Condensation: James Cameron

It's been an awfully long time since I tried to kick-start a series that condenses New Yorker articles into three sentences. I'd like to try again. In this week's issue, Dana Goodyear profiled filmmaker James Cameron, he of Abyss, the first two Terminator movies, Titanic and the forthcoming effects orgy Avatar. In many ways, it’s a typically smart New Yorker piece: Goodyear implies she started preparing for it at least a year and a half ago, she did a lot of reporting, and the writing is plenty sharp. (“All directors have a God complex; Cameron takes his unusually seriously.”) Still, it’s hard not to wonder why Goodyear and the magazine would take 10,763 words to say what could be summed up in five: “James Cameron is a toolbox.”

So here it is again, in three sentences:

Each spaceship reflected the character of its pilot, and also Cameron’s instinct for the iconic, literal image; to the mother ship, Nell, he gave a curvaceous shape and a pair of heaving breasts.

[Landau's] T-shirt said something about Tommy Bahama’s Dive Bar; staying close to Cameron means embracing scuba culture in whatever way you can.

"We want to say that this arch formed as igneous rock, that it’s a lava formation that got eroded, but it’s fracturing out along the crystal planes of minerals."